Google admits that some of its Docs have been accidentally shared

Users of the Google Docs application have had their information inadvertently shared.

A flaw has been identified in the system, which meant that some documents were marked down as collaborative items that allowed third parties who are also signed up to the system to access and amend them.

Google said that the flaw has now been fixed. Jennifer Mazzon, Google Docs product manager claimed that the sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document, and affected less than 0.05 per cent of all documents.

Mazzon said: “We've identified and fixed a bug where a very small percentage of users shared some of their documents inadvertently. The issue affected so few users because it only could have occurred for a very small percentage of documents, and for those documents only when a specific sequence of user actions took place.

“For this small percentage of documents, the bug occurred when the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and then changed the sharing permissions. The bug did not affect spreadsheets.

“As part of the fix, we used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as having been affected. We then emailed the document owners to point them to their affected documents in case they need to re-share them.”

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